Discuss: What is the best advice for foreign startups looking to enter Thailand?

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Discuss features short but strong and insightful opinions on interesting startup, entrepreneurship, and tech topics. Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Thailand, one of the original Asian Tigers, is reawakening. It’s economy has transformed itself from a tourist destination into an investor’s dream, and startups are coming in from all over Asia.

The country’s economic success crashed to its very foundation, as a real estate crisis led to the floating of the baht in 1997. The ensuing financial crisis was contagious and spread throughout Southeast Asia.

After years of battling recession and sluggish growth, the last two years have seen significant growth in startup investment in Asia. This subsequently fueled numerous startup launches, leading to a surge in foreign funding, and Thailand is making its mark as an investment hub in 2017. For example, Thailand-based InvestorZ, a finance app for investors and traders, made a scintillating entrance into the corporate world last year.

As a startup owner in Indonesia seeking to expand across Southeast Asia, I am curious to understand what it takes to succeed in Thailand. Does Thailand’s language, culture, and geopolitical environment influence how a company should enter the market? What marketing and distribution channels are most effective? Is it worth it to capture Thailand’s 68-million strong consumer market?

I asked Mark McDowell, general manager of Primal, a Thai-based marketing agency to provide invaluable insight.

According to him, more Thais are heading to the internet to purchase daily necessities, and this makes companies target the market via online advertising.

His advice to foreign startups is to seek beyond their own set up and connect with organizations that are already settled in Thailand—especially those who are past the concept phase. He believes that organizations that have been through the nitty-gritty of engaging with the Thai system best understand the Thai market. They can impart invaluable insights to greenhorns about the unique advantages and pitfalls of marketing in Thailand.

Startups in Thailand have also had their fair share of bad pitches and failed launches. According to McDowell, such ventures need to integrate brand and message into marketing strategies that resonate with the Thai culture. His point was that no matter what phase your startup is in, you need to use case studies and available metrics to make more effective marketing decisions. In other words, the best marketing weapon is messaging target audiences strategically through appropriate platforms. Keeping up to date with news and trends in Thailand is then essential.

For low-budget companies which may not afford to conduct surveys and extensive market research through digital agencies, McDowell suggests turning to email marketing. “A recent survey by DMA (Data and Marketing Association) showed that email marketing has an impressive ROI of 122 percent in Thailand. This is four times higher than more expensive marketing channels like paid search and direct mail,” he said.

McDowell also insists that consistency is key in social media.

“Don’t only aim to post regularly. Create a uniformed identity to your posts to help cultivate your online presence. The most popular channels in Thailand are Facebook and Instagram. Optimally, you want to post there five to 10 times a week. Twitter is more popular in the political sphere. Five tweets a day is optimal if those are the customers you want to target.”

Let’s discuss